Page 296 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Narrat ve Power and Med a Influence |

narratiVe studies
Narrative studies is an interdiscipline drawing intellectual perspectives from the arts, hu-
manities, social and behavioral sciences (especially cognitive psychology), and natural sci-
ences (especially neuroscience applied to memory). Narrative studies seeks to address four
questions:

1. How do human beings acquire knowledge through stories and storytelling?
2. How do human beings store and retrieve knowledge through stories and storytelling?
3. How do human beings disseminate knowledge through stories and storytelling?
4. How do human beings validate or invalidate knowledge through stories and story-
telling?
The concurrent study of media is implicated in each of these questions.

Which events will take prominence in the national plotline, and which will be
subordinated or denied? What locales will be privileged? What themes will
emerge?
When pulling the curtain on a voting booth, a citizen considers which presi-
dential candidate is more likely to tell the nation’s story in a way that values his
or her own viewpoints, priorities, and communities. The meaning of the story to
multiple audiences, both domestic and international, resides in the sensibility of
its teller. Think how different the American story sounded when told by John F.
Kennedy versus Richard Nixon, or consider the differences between Bill Clinton
and George W. Bush as national narrators.
For most of U.S. history, women have been relegated to the status of minor
characters. Until emancipation, African Americans were not considered char-
acters at all. Hundreds of years passed before women and persons of color
moved from the margins of America’s story toward its center. The same could
be said of the events, places, and times featuring those characters. The power of
a teller to construct narrative reality is so great, and the attendant privilege so
seductive, that most tellers are reluctant to relinquish their role. (Witness the
22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution legislating presidential term limits.)
America’s story is likely really to change when the demographic profile of the
storyteller changes. Electing a woman or person of color as national narrator
will represent a fundamental power shift; both possibilities have encountered
considerable cultural resistance.

ThE narraTivE roLE oF mEDia

It might seem that representatives of the media—professional print and
electronic journalists, as well as citizen journalists in digital formats—would
fit into a narrative model as meta-narrators, secondhand reporters of other
people’s stories and storytelling. The word “reporter” itself reinforces presump-
tions of impartiality and distance, as in court reporter. However, the narrative
role of media is much more significant than the reporter model suggests. Media